Reader's Request Week: Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

1 year ago

Reader’s Request Week: Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

AN ISLAND NEVER CRIES

by Chad Perman

“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.” - Thomas Wolfe

Lars is a lonely man, as so many of us are. He avoids life as much as humanly possible, avoids interactions and emotions, activities and relationships. He chooses to live a (mostly) solitary life, with days that are neat, predictable, and manageable. He rarely speaks with even his own brother, who lives but a few feet away, despite the valiant attempts of his brother’s wife, Karin (Emily Mortimer), to draw him out of his self-imposed bubble of isolation. From the outside looking in, it’s a sad life, but to Lars, it’s comfortable: he prefers things at a distance, and has constructed a life for himself that allows just such a distance from most every one and every thing.

And then Bianca comes into his life and things begins to change. There’s a hitch, though - she isn’t real.

No, Bianca is actually a life-size doll, the blow-up sex toy kind most often used for quite unsavory purposes. It’s certainly not surprising that Lars, lonely as he is, orders one of these sex toys over the internet late one night. What is surprising, though, is his intention in doing so: he wants someone to take care of, somebody safe to love.

But when he brings her next door to his brother and Karin’s house for a dinner “date” one night soon after her arrival - and introduces her as his wheelchair-bound Brazilian missionary girlfriend named Bianca - we finally begin to see that Lars is not merely a shy, lonely person with a great deal of social anxiety, but rather a delusional, troubled soul trapped in a deep state of arrested development.

The brilliant thing about Lars and the Real Girl, though, is what it chooses to do (and not to do) with this set-up. Writer Nancy Oliver (Six Feet Under, True Blood) and director Jim Gillepsie - to their great credit - were not interested in shaping a manic Jim Carrey or Farrelly Brothers-type movie from this raw material, but rather concerned themselves with the business of good old-fashioned, character-driven storytelling instead. That one of the lead characters is an inanimate object becomes, in Oliver’s hands, not a barrier but a tightrope; she leaves herself precious little room for error in the handling of it, but somehow manages to pull off an almost magical balancing act. And what’s more, she does so without entirely erasing the humor from it, mining humor from pain, character, and quirk, rather than the more obvious (and less interesting) slapsticky potentials inherent in a ‘man-in-love-with-doll’ situation. In other words: it’s a surprisingly mature, moving film.

You see, rather than laughing at or ridiculing Lars, the people around him choose to enable his delusion. They care so deeply for him - and worry so much for the various wounds he has suffered over the years - that they quickly come to accept Bianca and her presence in their lives. They talk to her, take care of her, drive her to church, let her spend the night, find her a “job”, and, in general, do the very best they can to make this inanimate object an actual living part of their tight-knit community.

Still, these people are not naive, and they understand something is deeply wrong with Lars. So, in time, they persuade him to see Dagmar (Patricia Clarkson), the local doctor who also works as a psychologist - “She has to, out this far north” - under the guise of providing medical care for Bianca. Dagmar soon becomes the dry, wise, compassionate heart behind the film, allowing Lars the time and space he needs to come to terms with his own guilt-ridden, traumatic past. Her therapy is calm and curious, warm and accepting, a gentle hand placed on his back, propelling him forward. She is the therapist everyone wishes they had (more than a good deal of which is no doubt due to Clarkson’s brilliant, lived-in performance). Through his meetings with Dagmar, eventually, the various walls of detachment Lars has worked so diligently towards constructing over the years begin to crumble, and life slowly seeps in.

Of course, none of this - not a single second - works without Ryan Gosling’s pitch-perfect performance in the title role. Gosling’s Lars is a thing of beauty, made up of a hundred small gestures that slowly clue us in rather than any kind of grand, swooping actorly performance that loudly announces to us at every moment what is going on. There might certainly be a place for all that, but it’s not here, not in this film, and Gosling is smart enough to recognize that. It’s often tempting to snicker at Lars’ situation, but Gosling doesn’t let you - and that’s no small feat. Instead, he creates bridges for the audience which allow us to identify with Lars. Sure, not a whole lot of us have blow-up dolls as girlfriends. But have we felt alone in our lives? Struggled with isolation, anxiety, sadness, trauma? Sure. Gosling gets that, and lets us get it, and by doing so, allows the ridiculousness of the situation to become slightly less ridiculous, and a lot more tragic. A lot more human. It’s a masterful performance.

Lars and the Real Girl is not a film you’ve seen before (and just try finding even a handful of films you can say that about these days). There is no real immediate frame of reference. It doesn’t give you a shorthand with which to enter into its world and provides no ironic wink-wink distance once you get there and find out its quirky narrative rules. This is not an entirely comfortable place for an audience to be - we usually like to know where we stand and how we’re supposed to react to something, whether we’ll admit it or not - and watching a film like this with even a small group of people quickly illustrates this point (go ahead, try it). But like a good many things that require some effort, some hanging-in-there, it does become worth the trouble, many times over. It might not be a perfect film, but it is a surprisingly beautiful one.